Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Money in the form of bills or coins; currency.
  • noun Liquid assets including bank deposits and marketable securities.
  • noun Money paid in currency or by check.
  • transitive verb To exchange for or convert into ready money.
  • idiom (cash on the barrelhead) Immediate payment.
  • noun Any of various Asian coins of small denomination, especially a copper and lead coin with a square hole in its center.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In coalmining, soft shale or bind.
  • noun A prehistoric wooden road, resembling an American plankroad, or corduroy road.
  • noun The name given by foreigners to the only coin in use among the Chinese, and called by them tsien (pronounced chen).
  • noun The name sometimes given by foreigners to a li (pronounced lē), or thousandth part of a Chinese liang or ounce.
  • noun A copper coin used for currency in Madras under the East India Company.
  • noun A coin of Pondicherry, having a value of one third of a cent.
  • noun A money of account in Sumatra, worth about 3 cents.
  • To turn into money, or to exchange for money: as, to cash a note or an order.
  • To pay money for: as, the paying teller of a bank cashes notes when presented.
  • noun Disbandment.
  • noun A receptacle for money; a money-box.
  • noun Money; primarily, ready money; money on hand or at command.
  • noun Money in hand; actual money, as distinguished from other property. Synonyms See money.
  • To discard; disband; cashier.
  • noun An abbreviation of cashier.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A Chinese coin.
  • transitive verb To pay, or to receive, cash for; to exchange for money.
  • transitive verb obsolete To disband.
  • noun obsolete A place where money is kept, or where it is deposited and paid out; a money box.
  • noun Ready money; especially, coin or specie; but also applied to bank notes, drafts, bonds, or any paper easily convertible into money.
  • noun Immediate or prompt payment in current funds.
  • noun (Bookkeeping) an account of money received, disbursed, and on hand.
  • noun [Colloq.] in large retail stores, a messenger who carries the money received by the salesman from customers to a cashier, and returns the proper change.
  • noun an account with a bank by which a person or house, having given security for repayment, draws at pleasure upon the bank to the extent of an amount agreed upon; -- called also bank credit and cash account.
  • noun sales made for ready, money, in distinction from those on which credit is given; stocks sold, to be delivered on the day of transaction.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Money in the form of notes/bills and coins, as opposed to cheques/checks or electronic transactions.
  • noun informal Money.
  • noun Canada Cash register.
  • verb transitive To exchange (a check/cheque) for money in the form of notes/bills.
  • verb poker slang To obtain a payout from a tournament.
  • noun Any of several low-denomination coins of India or China, especially the Chinese copper coin.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun money in the form of bills or coins
  • verb exchange for cash
  • noun prompt payment for goods or services in currency or by check
  • noun United States country music singer and songwriter (1932-2003)

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Obsolete French casse, money box (from Norman French; see case) or from Italian cassa (from Latin capsa, case).]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Portuguese caixa, from Tamil kācu, a small coin.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle French caisse ("money box"), from Old Provençal caissa, from Old Italian cassa, from Latin capsa ("box, case"), from capio ("I take, I seize, I receive"), from Proto-Indo-European *keh₂p- (“to grasp”).

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Tamil காசு (kāsu).

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Examples

  • For the full year, the Company generated positive operating cash flow of $629 million and ended the year with a total cash* position of $8.0 billion.

    MobileTechNews 2010

  • _cash_; to which is added a proviso authorizing the Secretary to withdraw the public deposits from any bank which shall refuse to receive as cash from the United States any notes receivable under the law which such bank receives in the ordinary course of business on general deposit.

    A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents Volume 3, part 1: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) 1878

  • The Company uses the term "cash operating income" as an important measure of profitability and performance.

    unknown title 2011

  • AIG is expecting to use the nearly $28 billion in cash from the Alico and AIA transactions to repay the credit facility extended to AIG by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as well as payments on other interests owned by the federal government.

    AIG Rescue Will Prove Profitable, Treasury Says Jeffrey Sparshott 2010

  • The code to tell our system that you are paying in cash is [1].

    Zales Store Receipts Really Don't Mean Anything - The Consumerist 2008

  • One such occasion appears to have been on June 19, 1898, when the recently appointed Durrani postmaster, Mirza Khalifa Ji Khan, went to the Peshawar Treasury to collect Rs. 5,58,954 in cash from the subsidy account. 42 In this instance, a quarrel broke out between the Durrani postmaster and his entourage, and British officials and their staffs, regarding the exact form of the coinage's packing in bags and boxes.

    Connecting Histories in Afghanistan: Market Relations and State Formation on a Colonial Frontier 2008

  • While Plainfield seems to have swept the disappearance of over $3,000 in cash from the Tax Collector's office under the rug, others jurisdictions are less forgiving.

    Archive 2007-07-01 Dan 2007

  • While Plainfield seems to have swept the disappearance of over $3,000 in cash from the Tax Collector's office under the rug, others jurisdictions are less forgiving.

    Government employees elsewhere prosecuted for theft. Not in Plainfield? Dan 2007

  • The work proves the feasibility of "pharmaceuticals from livestock," says Karl Ebert of Tufts University veterinary school -- and gives new meaning to the term cash cow.

    Barnyard Bioengineers 2008

  • Off the books and in cash is how those with no SSN get paid, maybe on the books and by check if they have an SSN.

    MORE GRINGO TAX 2006

Comments

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  • A kind of cow?

    April 25, 2008

  • from Sanskrit karsa, a weight of gold or silver but akin to Old Persian karsha-, a weight. a unit of value equivalent to one cash coin. Many words used for money come from weight, i.e. talent, pound, etc. Is this another case of that?

    August 30, 2009